Taylor Branchhttp://taylorbranch.com
Taylor Branch | American author and historian | The King Years | The King Era Trilogy | The Clinton Tapes | The CartelTue, 27 Jan 2015 23:30:17 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.3Student Exchange on College Sportshttp://taylorbranch.com/2014/12/12/student-exchange-on-college-sports/
http://taylorbranch.com/2014/12/12/student-exchange-on-college-sports/#commentsFri, 12 Dec 2014 18:42:11 +0000http://taylorbranch.com/?p=2244Please forgive my general silence in social media about Ferguson and other recent controversies over racial injustice. I have been immersed this fall in writing projects on that large subject in history. Here’s hoping they will contribute soon to the urgent debate.

Meanwhile, I try to keep abreast on other inquiries. Below from this morning is one digital exchange with a student on governance and corruption in college sports.

Dear Mr. Branch,

I am…a junior at Denison University, currently taking a Communication course on Sports in the Media, called “Of Virtue and Horror”. We have discussed and read many controversial issues within sports, both at the professional and college level, as well as gender, race and class issues that arise. These issues are important to me as a Division 3 athlete at Denison.

I had a few questions related to “The Shame of College Sports” article, if you have a chance to respond to any of them I would appreciate it. I was fascinated, even shocked, by the corruption within the NCAA and its power over athletes and Universities.

I am interested in the origin of the term “student-athlete”, which I know you discussed how it was constructed in order for the NCAA to avoid legal issues – yet do you believe that the term holds any integrity? Is it possible for one to be a student-athlete, particularly in Division 1 athletics?

Throughout the course, we have discussed the possibility of separating academic institutions from sports; would you see that as a potential solution to reduce corruption within Universities?

What repercussions would you predict to occur if the NCAA were to pay Division 1 athletes? Would there need to be certain criteria based on the skill level or success of certain athletes, on a case by case basis?

If you have the opportunity to comment briefly on any one of these questions, I would greatly appreciate it!

Thank you for your time,
[Signed]

REPLY

Dear [Signed],

Thanks for your interest. Here are some quick comments in response to your three questions.

[1] The term “student-athlete” serves no constructive purpose to my mind. I refuse to use it. By repetition, this mantra befuddles people into thinking that college athletes are unique hybrid creatures under NCAA jurisdiction. In fact, athletes are a small fraction of American students with active parallel careers. Some 14 million of the 20 million U.S. undergraduates have full- or part-time jobs while in school, but no one would think to call them “student-cashiers,” “student-teachers,” “student-investors,” or any of the myriad combinations. They are rightly students in the classroom, subject to academic rules, and free citizens in their outside pursuits. The same should hold true for athletes.

[2] Separating academics from athletics might make sense for some individual schools, especially those with highly commercialized sports, but the most needed change is clarity about the essential differences between sports and education. Without that, it is difficult or impossible to manage conflict between them with integrity. Currently, through the NCAA, colleges including yours impose on all college athletes a collusive work regimen that is the equivalent of a private tax on students who deliver pizza or give music lessons.

[3] No school can or should be required to pay athletes. If, however, the NCAA’s blanket restriction of college athletes is recognized as unfair, bogus, and potentially criminal under the anti-trust laws, colleges must make decisions on a new foundation. For the vast majority of U.S. colleges, bargaining rights for athletes would make little or no difference because there is not enough revenue to create a market for athletic talent. At the big-time sports schools, by contrast, fair markets in a multi-billion-dollar industry would tend to shift compensation from coaches and others to the players. In that case, some schools may choose to abolish revenue sports as incompatible with their academic mission. My guess is that most of the sports-intensive schools will develop separate conferences over time to compete at different financial levels.

Justice has been delayed because outsiders dream up every pretext not to address the basic rights of college athletes. They prefer to adjust those rights to convenience rather than the other way around. This is the true shame of college sports, which thankfully is besieged by reform on several fronts.

I hope these comments are helpful. The underlying issue is fairly simple, but vested interests and false education confuse things even at universities dedicated to rigorous thought. Please feel free to discuss your concerns further with me by phone.

Yours,
Taylor Branch

]]>http://taylorbranch.com/2014/12/12/student-exchange-on-college-sports/feed/0NCAA to Congress: Change Is Cominghttp://taylorbranch.com/2014/07/25/ncaa-to-congress-change-is-coming/
http://taylorbranch.com/2014/07/25/ncaa-to-congress-change-is-coming/#commentsFri, 25 Jul 2014 19:20:41 +0000http://taylorbranch.com/?p=2237Responding to charges of exploitation, the college-sports body promised big reforms at a Senate hearing. But questions about pay and rights for athletes remain unaddressed.

Originally posted on The Atlantic, July 24th, 2014

On July 9, 2014, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a public hearing entitled, “Promoting the Well-Being and Academic Success of College Athletes.” The committee questioned NCAA President Mark Emmert about growing public controversy over the NCAA’s stewardship. News stories emphasized that Emmert promised numerous reforms under heavy “grilling” from the senators.

I was among five other witnesses. Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller asked me to testify largely because of my article for The Atlantic nearly three years ago, “The Shame of College Sports.” Compiling that survey of NCAA history turned me from a casual defender of “pure” college sports into an advocate for athletes’ rights. In my view, the NCAA’s elaborate amateur code is extra-legal and bogus, if not criminal, and universities cannot honestly address conflict between sports and academics while imposing their amateur rules.

While not pretending to be neutral, I do try to be objective about the overall direction of the current debate. Three major developments came out of the hearing: All involved recognized a crisis, senators resisted the “employee” model as an alternative to the “student-athlete” status quo, and Emmert promised to overhaul NCAA governance.

Crisis Recognition

The senators and witnesses agreed in a virtual chorus that the structure of NCAA college sports requires major reform. In addition, senators from both political parties agreed that Congress has legal authority to compel changes if necessary. “We have jurisdiction over sports,” Rockefeller said. “All sports. And we have the ability to subpoena.” Republican Senator Dean Heller of Nevada wryly called it “lightning in a bottle” that for once he agreed with his Democratic chairman. “We do have jurisdiction in this Congress over the NCAA,” he said.

If the NCAA awarded truly democratic voting representation to college athletes, it would be a lesser version of political suffrage for women and slaves.

Heller also tempered any assumption that Republicans would defend the status quo or the NCAA from government intrusion. One by one, he branded the NCAA’s proposals for wholesale change an admission of wholesale failure in practice. “If tomorrow there was a bill in front of the United States Senate that would disband the NCAA,” he said to Emmert, “give me the reasons why I shouldn’t vote for that bill.”

Emmert presented seven reforms in progress. While a few are rhetorical, most are concrete and costly enough to be very controversial within the NCAA.

First, college athletes should be guaranteed “scholarships for life” until graduation, rather than the prevailing limit of one-year scholarships renewable at each school’s discretion.

Second, athletic scholarships should be increased to cover the “full cost of attendance.”

Third, the NCAA “should always lead in the area of health and safety.”

Fourth, the NCAA “must work assertively” on sexual assault prevention and support for victims. “This is a national crisis,” he said, citing a new study that some 30 percent of NCAA schools allow their athletic departments to handle allegations of sexual assault by athletes.

Fifth, the NCAA must close “any gaps in coverage” of medical treatment, including a $90,000 deductible in the NCAA’s insurance policy for catastrophic injury.

Sixth, the NCAA must provide college athletes with “the time as well as the resources they need” for academic success.

Seventh, the NCAA must support Title IX protections for female athletes, ensuring that reforms do not come at the expense of the “non-revenue-generating sports.”

No senator opposed these proposals, although Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the committee’s ranking Republican, said they “may disadvantage smaller schools that can’t afford them.” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, a former Stanford athlete, said he had been “quite taken aback” to learn from a private meeting that Emmert agreed “across the board” with his criticisms of NCAA policy. “Athletes are still exploited,” Booker said. “If they blow out their knee, if they somehow don’t meet the mandates of a coach, they lose their scholarship. They don’t get their degree.”

“If tomorrow there was a bill that would disband the NCAA,” Senator Heller said, “give me the reasons why I shouldn’t vote for that bill.”

When several senators doubted the NCAA’s capacity to deliver such sweeping change, Emmert disclosed that he would rely on a united initiative by all 65 universities from the five major athletic conferences (Southeastern Conference, Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten, Big 12, and PAC-12). Rockefeller interrupted to ask how anyone could expect positive leadership from the very schools that have commercialized college sports so aggressively. Emmert replied that they had the essential resources. Republican Senator Dan Coats of Indiana, who represents the NCAA Headquarters in Indianapolis, said he was encouraged because these top universities could exercise power “where these major issues fall.”

Thus, on the crisis front, the hearing revealed that Emmert has formed an internal alliance with the 65 strongest sports powers, bent on pushing tangible benefits for athletes through the NCAA’s full membership of some 1,100 colleges, universities, and athletic conferences.

The “Student-Athlete” vs. “Employee” Model

Senators from both parties worried that extended benefits for college athletes, while necessary and overdue, would undermine their special status. “I think the law here is headed in a very unfortunate direction … of regarding athletes at universities more and more as employees,” stated Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. He said there was a “growing inequality and asymmetry” between the productive but restricted athletes and the colleges harvesting wealth from sports. “That is classically the reason why labor law protections have applied to individuals who are potentially the victims of exploitation,” he told the hearing, “whether it’s in garment factories or at construction sites, or universities.”

Blumenthal said the unwelcome prospect of employee status had advanced markedly since a surprise ruling in March by National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) magistrate Peter Sung Ohr, who granted football players at Northwestern University the option to seek recognition as a trade union. That preliminary decision already has shaken public opinion about the potential standing of athletes. If upheld, it would expose a gaping contradiction between law and the NCAA’s private compact among schools. The NLRB would extend collective bargaining to players who are denied individual bargaining rights. Under NCAA rules, colleges jointly agree to banish any player who seeks or receives an “unauthorized” sports benefit—however small or indirect—for “unethical” conduct.

Several senators dismissed the distant chance of unionized college athletes. Short of that great leap, they questioned the concept of regular employment. Senator Blumenthal expressed a common desire “to return truly to the model of student-athletes … because I, too, as Dr. Emmert has articulated well, value the student-athlete model rather than the employee-employer model.” Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire was troubled by the idea of different treatment for athletes who do and do not produce revenue. “Some will be employees, and some won’t?” she asked. “Some will be student-athletes, and some won’t? I don’t see how that works.” An “employer-employee relationship” in college sports, observed Ayotte, would create “sort of a second category of athlete on campus. I find that bothersome.”

In my judgment, common sense was lost in a fog of terminology about jobs. Undergraduate employment is anything but complicated, fateful, or rare. Of some 20 million students enrolled in the United States, more than 10 million work part-time and another four million hold down full-time employment on the side. These numbers dwarf the 460,000 fellow scholars in college sports. Working students fill hundreds of job categories without being labeled student-waiters, student-legislators, student-librarians, student-entrepreneurs, or the like. Doing so would blur functions and responsibilities that belong rightly in separate spheres.

For six decades, the NCAA has beguiled the world with its crafted phrase “student-athlete.” This hybrid designation, repeated incessantly, aims to cement a fused image of dependent college players. NCAA officials insist that multiple roles would violate the integrity of a “student-athlete” to the point of cutting him or her in half. Their mantra, rejecting career distinctions that are essential and normal elsewhere, defines these hybrids as “students-first” in the sports industry and yet different from others in class. Colleges cooperate by assigning the external, non-teacher NCAA a growing role in the academic certification of athletes. Inevitably, public debate will sort through defensive hysteria about sports jobs on campus.

NCAA Governance

Two major announcements by NCAA President Mark Emmert went relatively unnoticed in the press. First, he declared support for imminent plans to concentrate the NCAA’s governing authority in a small fraction of the membership. Second, he said the NCAA soon may award voting representation to college athletes themselves. The latter shift, if truly democratic, is basic enough to become a lesser sports version of political suffrage for women and slaves.

“In less than a month now,” Emmert told the senate hearing, “the Division I Board will vote on a completely changed decision-making structure that will put all of the subjects we are describing here today in the hands of the 65 universities that have the largest [sports] revenue.” Those universities comprise less than 20 percent of the 350 Division I schools and six percent of the overall NCAA membership. Vesting power in them would breach Emmert’s parallel assertion that the NCAA “is a democratically governed, membership-led association of nearly 1,100 colleges and universities … Members make rules through a representative process much as you do in Congress.”

Working students fill hundreds of job categories without being labeled student-waiters or student-librarians. So why “student-athletes”?

Raw politics peeked from earnest testimony about the NCAA’s stated mission: “to integrate intercollegiate athletics into higher education so that the educational experience of the student-athlete is paramount.” Emmert declared he would use public pressure from the Senate hearing as a “cattle prod” to drive home the structural changes necessary for reform. That means convincing Division I schools to accept hegemony under the 65 sports powers able to stretch their competitive advantage by improving conditions for athletes. Their five dominant sports conferences now own the forthcoming college football playoffs outright, with no share due the NCAA, heralding a bonanza richer and more secure than the NCAA’s broadcasting contract for March Madness basketball. The ascendant conference commissioners, plus television executives in the wings, have sought greater autonomy from the NCAA with hints of secession.

Emmert made the best of being caught in a devil’s bargain. He emphasized that NCAA bylaws give him no vote or formal authority, and Rockefeller lamented the vague lines of accountability. “How can you make the case for saying you can be a participant in all this change,” he asked, “when you say they don’t have to listen to anything you say?” Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri said she felt for Emmert’s plight, “because part of me thinks you’re captured by those you are supposed to regulate … And I can’t tell whether you’re in charge or whether you’re a minion to them.” Asking why he could not secure transparency for crucial proceedings, McCaskill made public a recent NCAA roll call in which most member schools voted—far from guaranteeing athletic scholarships “for life,” or for the four college years—to restore the 40-year ban on scholarship offers longer than one year at a time. “I think you’ll be surprised,” she told fellow senators of the strange coalitions revealed. Harvard, which does not offer athletic scholarships, voted for the one-year limit in order to reduce cost burdens on poorer schools. Sports-mad Texas, whose coaches had pushed for the original 1973 rule, voted likewise in order to maximize control over its athletes.

The senators secured no promise of transparency in college rule-making or finance, which are notoriously opaque. Emmert relieved a gloomy stretch of testimony by volunteering the prospect of NCAA membership for college athletes. Mentioning my earlier praise for the Olympic and Amateur Sports Act of 1978, in which Congress established a voting stake for active athletes on the 39 U.S. Olympic committees, he said his reform package to be voted on in August “will include full representation of students as voting members alongside the presidents and athletic directors on all the [NCAA] legislative bodies.” This news startled me.

Emmert promptly qualified his potential break with the NCAA’s paternal structure, adding that students already hold “advisory” NCAA positions. “If I might, ma’am,” he told Senator McCaskill, “the student-athlete advisory committees advised against putting in the multi-year scholarships, because they happen to agree with coaches that it was a good incentive for their colleagues to remain engaged.” He said student influence explained why some universities voted to restore the one-year limit in the roll-call she had unearthed. “Their very own student-athlete advisory committees said, ‘No, no, no, don’t give multi-year scholarships’,” Emmert testified. “‘We like one-year scholarships’.”

McCaskill looked nonplussed, beyond skeptical. “I would like to talk to those students …” she said. “I have a hard time imagining that any student thinks it’s in their best interest to get a one-year scholarship rather than a four-year scholarship.”

The hearing lurched between revelation and disappointment. Changes menace the NCAA on many fronts, driven mostly by the few universities that have built a multi-billion-dollar side business on talent captured from their undergraduates. Sound governance remains hostage to deadlock, credulity, and shell games, while everyone professes devotion to education for the young. “Congress doesn’t usually follow through,” Rockefeller said in closing. “… I mean the world works in ways that protect itself, but this is a particularly ugly one.”

Thank you, Senator Rockefeller. Thank you, Senator Thune. Thank you, members of the Committee. I am honored to be here.

My name is Taylor Branch, from Baltimore, Maryland. My educational background includes an AB degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1968) and an MPA (Master of Public Affairs) degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (1970). Since 1976, I have made my living primarily as an independent author of books.

Pertinent to the title for your session today, “Pursuing the Well-Being and Academic Success of College Athletes,” I wrote a capsule history of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) for the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, entitled “The Shame of College Sports.” Because of widespread public debate that ensued, I expanded the Atlantic article into a digitally published e-book called The Cartel, and I proposed a short “Three-Point Reform Agenda for Sports in Higher Education.” The agenda is available on my website.

What follows are summary comments for possible discussion under three headings: Amateurism, Balance, and Equity.

AMATEURISM

“Amateurism” has become the distinguishing feature of NCAA governance. It is identified in official pronouncements as “a bedrock principle of college athletics .” The NCAA Bylaws define and mandate amateur conduct as follows: “Student athletes shall be amateurs in an intercollegiate sport, and their participation should be motivated primarily by education and by the physical, mental and social benefits to be derived. Student participation in intercollegiate athletics is an avocation, and student athletes should be protected from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.”

The word “amateur” reflects conflicted attitudes about money, youth, and the purpose of recreation. Its broad ambivalence has opened a muddled flexibility in public habits, allowing the United States to become the world’s only nation to develop commercialized sports at institutions of higher learning. Even the major universities involved, which were founded to uphold intellectual rigor, routinely ignore or excuse the contradictions of a multi-billion-dollar side-industry built on their undergraduate students.

Confusion and mythology begin with the word itself. Dictionary synonyms for “amateur” range from a wholesome “enthusiast” or “devotee” to a bumbling “dabbler” or “rookie.” Merriam-Webster gives a stinging illustration of the latter tone: “The people running that company are a bunch of amateurs.” Accordingly, the same word expresses praise and scorn without distinction. This ambiguity gains reinforcement in our uniquely designed world of sports, where fans are encouraged to cheer and boo without thinking objectively.

The ideal of ancient Greek amateurism has always been misleading, because the athletes of Olympus actually competed for huge prizes. Aristotle researched well-rewarded champions back through records of the earliest Olympic festivals, and modern scholars have confirmed evidence of high-stakes victory and loss . “Ancient amateurism is a myth,” noted the classicist David Young . “Purists who refused to mix money with sport did not exist in the ancient world,” concludes Michael B. Poliakoff, “and victors’ monuments boast of success in the cash competitions as openly as they boast of victory in the sacred contests .”

Golf legend Bobby Jones is enshrined in modern sports history as the model amateur, and gentleman, who declined every championship prize he earned. His reputation fits the true definition of “amateur,” which is derived from the Latin “amator,” or “ lover,” specifying one who chooses to pursue a skill out of subjective devotion rather than the hope of financial gain .

Some non-college sports still allow athletes to declare and renounce amateur status.

Significantly, students called themselves amateurs when they invented intercollegiate sports after the Civil War . Until 1905, students retained general control of the new phenomenon in everything from schedule and equipment to ticket sales. They recruited alumni to construct Harvard Stadium in 1903 with zero funds from the college . “Neither the faculties nor other critics assisted in building the structure of college athletics,” declared Walter Camp (Yale class of 1880), who became the “father” of college football in his spare time.

The NCAA, created in 1906, slowly transformed the amateur tradition inherited from college athletes . Its board declared a goal of “total faculty control” as late as 1922, and the weak NCAA organization could not hire its first full-time staff member until 1951 . After that, however, burgeoning revenue from television contracts allowed NCAA officials to enforce amateur rules as an objective requirement rather than a subjective choice . This is problematic, because attempts to regulate personal motivation and belief commonly run afoul of the Constitution. Even if internal standards were allowed, and somehow could be measured, NCAA rules contradict their requirement that college sports must be an “avocation,” or calling (“vocare,” to call, from “voc-, vox,” voice), by denying athletes an essential voice. NCAA rules govern the players by fiat, excluding them from membership and consent.

BALANCE

Checks and balances are required for sound governance, and the NCAA structure is unbalanced in at least four respects. First, NCAA enforcement suffers an inherent conflict of interest between alleged violations in football, as opposed to basketball, because the organization lost its television revenue from college football and is almost wholly dependent on a sole-source broadcasting contract for the March Madness basketball tournament .

Second, the NCAA structure creates a false impression of common practice between the few schools that aggressively commercialize college athletics—roughly 100-150 of some 1,200 NCAA members—and the vast majority of schools with small crowds and negligible sports revenue. An elastic NCAA “amateurism” stretches all the way from a Division III cross-country race to Notre Dame football on ESPN.

Third, NCAA officials resolutely obscure differences between commercialized sports and the academic mission on campus. In the classroom, colleges transfer highly valued expertise to students, but this traditional role is reversed in big-time sports. Athletes there deliver highly valued expertise to the colleges. This distinction is basic, and is fundamental to your committee’s stated purpose of promoting educational integrity. College athletes are, or should be, students in the classroom and competitors in the athletic department. They face multiple roles, like most Americans, but their conflicting demands cannot be managed or balanced until they are squarely recognized. The NCAA undermines this logical separation by insisting that sports are an educational supplement for a hybrid creature under its jurisdiction, called the “student-athlete.” Universities implicitly concur by offloading some of their academic responsibility to the NCAA.

Fourth, the NCAA and its member schools strip rights from athletes uniquely as a class. No college tries to ban remunerative work for all students, and no legislature could or would write laws to confiscate earnings from one targeted group of producers in a legitimate enterprise. On the contrary, universities sponsor extensive work-study programs, and student-citizens exercise freedom to market skills everywhere from bookstore jobs and pizza delivery to the entrepreneurial launch of Facebook—unless they are athletes. For college athletes alone, the NCAA brands such industry “unethical.”

EQUITY

Basic fairness requires attention to the rights and freedoms of participants above the convenience of observers. Applied to college sports, this principle would mean that no freedom should be abridged because of athletic status. While I am neither a lawyer nor a professional economist, I find ample historical evidence that experts object to collusion in the NCAA’s regulatory structure.

In Microeconomics, a prominent textbook, professors Robert Pindyck and Daniel Rubinfeld make the NCAA a featured example of an economic cartel that reaps anti-competitive profit . The courts have agreed in two landmark cases. In NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (1984), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the NCAA’s exclusive control of college football broadcasts as an illegal restraint of trade . Overnight, the major football schools won freedom to sell every broadcast their markets would bear, without having to share the proceeds with smaller schools through the NCAA. (“We eat what we kill,” bragged one official at the University of Texas.) In Law v. NCAA (1998), assistant coaches won a $54-million settlement along with an order vacating the NCAA’s $16,000 limit on starting salaries . The compensation of assistant football coaches has cracked the $1 million barrier since then , with salaries skyrocketing even in “non-revenue” sports. By 2010, the University of Florida paid its volleyball coach $365,000 .

Thus, the supervisors of college sports won economic freedom, and they enjoy enormous largesse from a distorted cartel market that now shackles only the most vital talent: the players. “To reduce bargaining power by student athletes,” wrote Pindyck and Reubinfeld, “the NCAA creates and enforces rules regarding eligibility and the terms of compensation .” NCAA officials, of course, steadfastly assert that their whole system is devoted to the educational benefit of college athletes. “Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing, and protecting young people,” NCAA president Mark Emmert vowed when he announced NCAA sanctions for the recent scandal at Penn State . Such professions must be reconciled with NCAA rules that systematically deny college athletes a full range of guaranteed rights—from due process and representation to the presumption of innocence. These rules can turn words on their head, like Alice in Wonderland. The NCAA’s bedrock pledge to avoid “commercial exploitation” of college athletes, for instance, aims to safeguard them from getting paid too much, or at all, rather than too little in the ordinary usage of the word exploit: “to use selfishly for one’s ends—employers who exploit their workers. ”

In closing, I would suggest one hopeful precedent from the past work of your Commerce Committee. This is not the first time that the governance of amateur sports, together with the education of college athletes, has presented a daunting tangle of passions and vested interests. Fifty years ago, an early bonanza in sports revenue intensified a bitter feud between the NCAA and the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which controlled access to the Olympic Games. AAU leaders accused an “unpatriotic” NCAA of sabotaging U.S. chances to win medals. They claimed that college athletes already were “paid,” and therefore not amateurs at all, once the NCAA approved athletic scholarships in 1956. NCAA officials retorted that AAU coaches were “parasites” on college training facilities. The two sides nitpicked, boycotted, sabotaged, and disqualified each other until President Kennedy enlisted no less a mediator than General Douglas MacArthur to mediate U.S. hopes for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The squabbling exhausted MacArthur, who recommended Blue Ribbon commissions that brought proposals eventually to this Committee.

Your predecessors shaped what became the Olympic and Amateur Sports Act of 1978 . One key provision of that law secured for active athletes a twenty-percent share of the voting seats on each of the thirty-nine new U.S. Olympic Committees. Though small, this representation soon transformed amateur sports. Granted a voice, athletes tipped the balance on governing committees in the United States and inexorably around the globe. Marathon races, then tennis tournaments, recognized a right for players to accept prize money and keep their Olympic eligibility. New leagues sprang up to popularize volleyball and other games with corporate sponsors. Olympic officials came to welcome “professional” competitors in every sport except boxing. By 1986, when the International Olympic Committee expunged the word “amateur” from its bylaws, the modified Games defied every prediction of disaster. Indeed, most people scarcely noticed the change. Some of you helped recognize success in the revised Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act of 1998.

This example suggests a good place to start. Wherever possible, make the athletes true citizens rather than glorified vassals in college sports. Challenge universities in turn to make wise, straightforward decisions about the compatibility of commercialized sports with education.

[20] Emmert quoted in Taylor Branch, “The NCAA Entrenches Itself as Part of the Problem,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 1, 2012.

[21] Listing for “exploit” at www.dictionary.reference.com.

[22] Kenny Moore, Bowerman and the Men of Oregon. New York: Rodale, Inc., 2006, p. 349; Joseph M. Turrini, The End of Amateurism in American Track and Field. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010, pp. 74-83, 140-147.

Happy New Year. This is a personal note about career innovation in the works.

December’s front-page headline in the Baltimore Sun captures our leap of faith: UB Hopes New Type of Online Class Will Transform Education. UB is the University of Baltimore, here in my home city, and “hope“ is the operative word. We are excited and unsure, improvising every day, signing up various kinds of students from potentially the entire globe for our first weekly seminar on Tuesday, January 28, 2014.

The path of adaptation strains upward but rushes ahead. Only a year ago, Simon & Schuster published my compact narrative history, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement. Based on classroom discussions from Alabama to Idaho, I gave the book an unusual author’s dedication, “For students of freedom and teachers of history.“

Civic education has suffered in part because school standards now emphasize math and reading above history. This is a special hazard in a country founded as a bold experiment to secure freedom in the capacity of citizens for self-government.

Many teachers, under siege, had urged me to preserve the storytelling engagement of my civil rights histories in a shorter format for the digital age. These selected moments now reach back fifty years to a dimly remembered civil rights era, when movements led by ordinary citizens uplifted the founding premise of We the People. Their disciplined public trust dispelled cynicism. Their struggles offer abiding lessons for the future.

I had taught seminars in civil rights history since the 1990s, most recently at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Our recent experiments at the University of Baltimore have measured the promise of online learning by the standards of academic rigor. Can a course fairly serve both in-class students and digital participants from Hawaii or Russia? Such problems occupied us through most of 2013.

Now we take the next step. Citizenship & Freedom is not a MOOC. Freedom is not free, but quality education should be affordable.

This website has tracked a number of my professional pursuits, from author’s notes and speeches to ongoing clashes with the NCAA and our experimental online college history class, “Citizenship and Freedom.” Here is something different.

Our daughter Macy married John Macaskill on September 7. The official wedding photos offer glimpses of a storybook moment for our merged family and friends. Christy and I are still amazed that we could produce such a beautiful, happy bride.

The ceremony took place at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Cold Spring Harbor, NY, where Macy had been christened. Her maternal grandmother, Kay Macy, has belonged there since 1950, and we were blessed to have “Mum” the wedding’s senior attendant at 101 years old! The immediate families posed afterward outside, with brothers Ben Macaskill (l) and Franklin Branch on the flanks.

At the reception, hosted by our new in-laws John and Bridget Macaskill, Macy asked me to sing “My Girl” for her. This was a thrill second only to walking her down the aisle, but there was drama on the stage. Starlight’s bandleader said I was supposed to accompany myself. I panicked. With aplomb, she told me to stall while she urgently recalled musicians from their break.

This video, courtesy of my brother Gary’s cell phone, picks up in mid-stall.

Tradition obliges the father of the bride to offer a toast during the reception dinner. Despite rambling praise, mine did beat the strict 10-minute time limit. What bubbled up included a surprise tribute for Christy, who once saved Macy’s life, and my sister Lucie’s cell phone captured family memories for those who care to indulge them.

]]>http://taylorbranch.com/2013/11/27/a-dads-dream/feed/0Elephant in the Room: Is Partisan Gridlock Driven By Coded Silence About Race?http://taylorbranch.com/2013/09/25/elephant-in-the-room-is-partisan-gridlock-driven-by-coded-silence-about-race/
http://taylorbranch.com/2013/09/25/elephant-in-the-room-is-partisan-gridlock-driven-by-coded-silence-about-race/#commentsWed, 25 Sep 2013 16:24:38 +0000http://taylorbranch.com/?p=2099First, the pleasant news. Christy and I were invited to attend the 13th annual National Book Festival in Washington. It was my second appearance there as one of the 100 or so featured authors for the year.

The reception on Friday night September 20 took place in the main Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress, with its stunning vaulted ceilings of classical mosaics. That entrance hall is one of the most beautiful public spaces in the world. It lifts the spirit. I wish every child could spend time there on a school visit to the patriotic sites of Washington.

We visited a number of friends at the reception, including our former Baltimore Orioles compatriot Jonathan Yardley, who is now a transplanted Washington Nats fan, and his wife Marie Arana, author of an acclaimed new biography of Simon Bolivar. I got a novel about John Brown signed by author James McBride, but I missed Linda Ronstadt, whose book “Simple Dreams” sold out quickly, spurred by poignant news that Parkinson’s Disease has ended her singing career.

Rumors circulated that the National Park Service will banish the Book Festival from the National Mall beginning in 2014, for security reasons or merely to spare the grass. Future festivals would be moved indoors to the Washington Convention Center. If so readers will suffer a loss, because the outdoor event draws crowds up to 100,000 people circulating among open tents marked by pennant flags for book categories from fiction to poetry.

My hour’s presentation in the History and Biography tent was fairly raucous by literary standards. I argued that our contemporary political discourse is sadly out of balance with the legacy of freedom from “The King Years” 50 years ago. Fearful hostility erodes pubic trust, and liberals are partly to blame. Not even President Obama can discuss the influence of racial politics.

One of the points we discussed would generate Ifill’s question to President Obama about the racial underpinnings of partisan gridlock in the United States. She and co-anchor Judy Woodruff talked with President Obama in the White House the next day, immediately after his speech at the 50th anniversary commemoration of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The 50th anniversary drew widespread news coverage for a week. Its impact on politics and national discourse is still uncertain. Here are three recent tweets with links to programs that raise what I think are the most significant legacies and challenges from the 1963 March:

]]>http://taylorbranch.com/2013/08/30/highlights-from-media-appearances-on-the-dream-march-at-50/feed/0Eight Discussion Points about the 1963 March on Washingtonhttp://taylorbranch.com/2013/08/18/eight-discussion-points-about-the-1962-march-on-washington/
http://taylorbranch.com/2013/08/18/eight-discussion-points-about-the-1962-march-on-washington/#commentsMon, 19 Aug 2013 05:48:30 +0000http://taylorbranch.com/?p=20541. Martin Luther King’s prepared speech did not include any of the famous “dream” sequence.

Fifty years ago, on August 28, 1963, one of many American protests became the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, achieving worldwide acclaim with four simple words: “I have a dream.” The legend endures beyond memory from a dwindling number of witnesses, but no one alive that day anticipated its sweetly patriotic glow. Dr. Martin Luther King groaned under pressure, planning to say nothing like those four words. Bayard Rustin, a fabled pacifist in charge of logistics, prepared feverishly for the unknown. “If you want to organize anything,” he shouted to volunteers, “assume that everybody is absolutely stupid. And assume yourself that you’re stupid.” Some of Rustin’s helpers slapped together 80,000 cheese sandwiches. Others hauled twenty-one first-aid stations to outdoor spots along the stately National Mall.

The public girded for mayhem. NBC’s Meet the Press aired official predictions that it would be “impossible” for Negroes to petition in numbers without civic disorder. A preview in Life magazine surveyed Washington’s “worst case of invasion jitters since the First Battle of Bull Run.” The Kennedy Administration quietly deployed 4,000 riot troops near downtown, with 15,000 paratroopers on alert. A District of Columbia order banned liquor sales for the first time since Prohibition. Local hospitals stockpiled plasma and canceled elective surgery to save beds. Most federal agencies urged employees to stay home. Eighty percent of private business closed for the day. A week ahead, to be safe, Major League Baseball postponed not one but two home games for the Washington Senators.

Early arrivals confounded these apprehensions. One jaunty teenager wafted along Pennsylvania Avenue on roller skates, finishing a week-long journey from Chicago. Trainloads of pilgrims spilled from Union Station singing spirituals. A CBS camera mounted high in the Washington Monument showed a panorama that swelled crowd estimates upwards of 250,000. Bob Dylan strummed his new folk anthem, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and the first black “airline stewardess” led cheers for progress. Rustin herded dignitaries briskly through a long program, allowing emcee A. Philip Randolph to introduce the final speaker ahead of his appointed time.

King looked over a vast spectacle. He had failed this closing task once before from these steps at the Lincoln Memorial, with many of the same civil rights leaders present. Relatively few Americans noticed or remembered his 1957 “Give Us the Ballot” speech, and King himself had pushed for a second chance to define the historical moment. “We are on a breakthrough,” he argued over wiretapped phone lines, startling aides accustomed to his caution, telling them to contact Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, about a “mass protest” for jobs and freedom. King aimed to build on national momentum spiraling from spring demonstrations in Birmingham, but he carried a burden described intimately there in his letter from jail: “…when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at a tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments…”

He opened his address by reaching back to Lincoln. “Five score years ago,” King paraphrased, “a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” Against Lincoln’s fidelity to national purpose, he threw up a clanging image of deadbeat history. “America has given the Negro people a bad check,” King proclaimed, “a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” He said segregation stamped default on freedom’s core promise. Heartfelt voices cheered his raw illustrations along with his wishful hope not to find always that “the bank of justice is bankrupt.”

Suddenly King balked. He could not bring himself to deliver his carefully written conclusion, beginning with the next line: “And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction.” He improvised a warning not to “wallow in the valley of despair.” Then he stalled for an ending. “I say to you today, my friends, and so,” said King, an orator dancing on edge, “even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow–”

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USA Weekend has published a shorter version of this essay replete with period photographs. View photo essay

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Freedom in 50-Year Blinks

King hesitated before a unique nation that was young and yet also the world’s seasoned pioneer in freedom. The gist of our story fit within three 50-year blinks. In 1813, fighting England, President James Madison pronounced his country “the first genuine democracy engaged in a war since the ancients.” Madison, the Constitution’s chief framer, reluctantly accepted battle to show that a daring experiment in self-government could survive scornful empires abroad and dissent at home. (“It is high time we had a king,” grumbled one doubter in Washington.) Though a slaveholder himself, Madison condemned slavery, and he conceded from firsthand experience that slave power drove nearly every founding compromise of democratic principle. “Great as the evil is,” he lamented, “a dismemberment of the union would be worse.”

Fifty years later, in 1863, President Lincoln stood fast in the crucible of Madison’s fear. Preserving union through a war that doomed slavery, the Emancipator welcomed “a new birth of freedom” at Gettysburg, where he pledged “increased devotion” to the “unfinished work” of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson dismissed the Lincoln message at Gettysburg’s 50-year commemoration, branding it an “impertinence” to discuss what the Civil War meant. Wilson promptly segregated the federal government by race. On the day he took office, six women on horseback led 5,000 suffragists down Pennsylvania Avenue in classical costumes with breastplates and plumed helmets. Some 200,000 spectators ridiculed their plea for the female vote, heckling them for sex or supper instead, but news of this grand commotion sparked the novel concept of political drama in Washington by citizens at large.

Another fifty years brought King to pause at the Lincoln Memorial. Two World Wars made his United States a preeminent global power. Cherished claims of equal citizenship accommodated whites-only privilege down into public libraries and rest stops, on custom widely reinforced by criminal law. Earlier in 1963, Alabama’s Governor George Wallace vowed to uphold “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Women had won their suffrage amendment long ago, but Rustin’s marshals still diverted female leaders into a secondary freedom march along Independence Avenue. King, like Madison, saw no rational bridge across the chasms of empathy and perception. Figuratively, he closed his eyes.

A Song with Three Refrains

“–I still have a dream,” King resumed. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed…” He took flight extemporaneously on rhetoric ingrained in him but new to the huge national audience. His cadence rose gradually through nine dreams of racial justice into a tenth, spiritual vision from the prophet Isaiah. “I have a dream, that one day every valley shall be exalted,” he said, in pulsing delivery. “Every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together!

“This is our hope,” King continued, pulling back from a glimpse of purified humanity. “This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith…” Like a jazz musician, he composed off this phrase a second riff on determination in pursuit of dreams. “With this faith,” it ended, “we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.” King dramatized that prospect by reciting the first verse of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” from sweet liberty and pilgrims to “Let freedom ring.”

Quickening again, he pushed his baritone into high register. “And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true,” King intoned. “So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire…Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!” Eleven times he launched variations on this third refrain, embracing not only the treasured landscape but also fearsome bastions of white supremacy. “Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi!” he shouted. “From every mountainside, let freedom ring!” His distinctive voice enveloped the words in a furnace of warring release, fusing ecstasy with anguish and disappointment with hope.

“And when this happens,” King cried out, “when we allow freedom to ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

Reactions Divide History

Most television viewers witnessed their first and last complete King speech that day. “He’s damned good,” President Kennedy remarked at the White House. The New York Times hailed the “Peroration by Dr. King” in one of five front-page stories about the March. Life Magazine, with Rustin pictured nobly on the cover, gushed over scenes of “beatific calm” in a photo essay featuring “Negro Gothic” couples in crisp jeans, “reminiscent of [the] famous Grant Wood painting.” To excuse their prior alarms, Rustin teased, reporters now lionized him as a dark Caribbean wizard whose tricks made scary Negroes nice enough for afternoon tea.

Not everyone shared the admiration and relief. FBI Headquarters produced a hostile assessment that “in light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday, he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders.” This distinction moved Director J. Edgar Hoover to approve a secret FBI directive on King: “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”

Other appraisals ranged from conflicted discovery to confession. Newsweek Magazine compiled a special issue after the March, asking, “How much equality is the white man willing to grant the Negro?” Its polls found that eighty percent of white citizens, including sixty percent of Southerners, said minorities were denied fairness and basic rights, but seventy-four percent also believed “Negroes are moving too fast.”

NBC televised a three-hour news special, American Revolution ’63, in prime time without commercials. Americans sensed “their lives are being altered forever,” said host Frank McGee. His composure slipped in regret of commentaries that had patronized King’s bus boycotters as “teenagers demanding to stay out after 9:30.” News anchor Chet Huntley starkly recalled his Montana childhood. “We were a frontier people,” he said. “…We never really looked with honesty at Negroes the way we examined the anatomy of a grasshopper, say, or speculated on the after-hours life of a teacher. We looked, but we had been told what to see.”

For balance, the NBC documentary presented hardline segregationists. “You are witnessing one more chapter in what has been termed the television revolution,” said Mississippi’s Governor Ross Barnett. Charging that the media “publicized and dramatized the race issue far beyond its relative importance,” he formulated—ironically on network television—a “smoke screen” theory of phony news concocted to help King’s demonstrators and unscrupulous politicians. “The real goal of the conspiracy,” Barnett told NBC viewers, “is the concentration of all effective power in the central government in Washington.”

No one adapted Barnett’s premise more adroitly than George Wallace. By the end of 1963, with segregation losing its stable respectability, he dropped the word altogether from a fresh stump speech denouncing “big government” by “pointy-headed bureaucrats,” tyrannical judges, and “tax, tax, spend, spend” legislators. He spurned racial discourse, calling it favoritism, and insisted with aplomb that he had never denigrated any person or group in his fight for local control. Wallace, though still weighted by a hateful reputation, mounted the first of three strong presidential campaigns. “We have shaken the eyeteeth of every liberal in the country,” he said.

King’s Dream at 50

Now we come to a 50-year blink for the 1963 March on Washington. This will be only the fourth such span since 1813, as noted, which offers a compact perspective on defining themes in American history. King’s “dream” speech, along with the bus protest started by Rosa Parks, is remembered in school lessons for children here and abroad. His statue stands now across the Tidal Basin from Thomas Jefferson, not far from the Lincoln Memorial. Of the official national holidays, only the one for him honors by name a leader who never sought or held public office. King served a prophet’s role. He made urgent the simple but profound challenge that runs through American heritage. Putting one foot in the Constitution and the other in Scriptures, he refined an ecumenical standard of equal votes and equal souls.

Oratory alone cannot explain King’s impact. He spoke for a nonviolent citizens’ movement that engaged representatives of the nation, in his words, to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” Sacrifice amplified the speeches, and most bloodshed in the civil rights era followed the 1963 March, beginning with the grisly church bombing eighteen days later that killed four Birmingham girls. Ku Klux Klan murders came hard upon the Kennedy assassination, from three students lynched in Mississippi to a Boston pastor beaten to death on a voting-rights march in Selma, and a dozen more martyrs preceded King himself in 1968.

By then the movement had opened stubborn gates to freedom. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 reduced not only segregation’s rank injustice but also a paralyzing stigma on the white South, leading to Sunbelt prosperity. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 stripped white supremacy from democracy’s bedrock franchise, enabling the first two-party competition in the South since the Civil War. Laws that criminalized racial intermarriage in most states fell void, along with many state laws that curtailed or prohibited jury service by women.

Such blatant restrictions have become difficult for new generations to remember, or believe, but female students had been barred from many professions and most prominent colleges, let alone from the military academies. Segregated sports persisted beyond King’s life, as the 1969 Texas Longhorns were the last all-white college football team to win a national championship. The notion of female rabbis, which was preposterous for two thousand years of rabbinic Judaism, became commonplace soon after the civil rights struggle. Collateral citizens’ movements advanced marginalized causes from disabled persons to the natural environment. Homosexual people emerged, beyond the imagination of King’s dreamers, from closeted terror to legal security approaching gay marriage. Negroes shifted collective identity to black people, then African Americans, and the nation elected one of them President of the United States.

President Barack Obama stands at a pinnacle of breathtaking change since 1963, but he has scarcely escaped an undertow from the past. Like King in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, the president himself remains “constantly at a tip-toe stance.” It is a delicate matter for him to mention race at all, no matter how much it might inform his experience. Recently, when he expressed qualified identification with Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager tracked and killed with impunity in Florida, criticism erupted that President Obama was injecting himself and racial friction into matters best left alone. The New York Times quoted a complaint that his remarks betrayed “the great achievement of our society, the possibility of not talking about race.”

This uproar exposes a dangerous wish. To silence race collapses American history into a fairy tale, blotting out the central drama of democratic progress. The original framers of the Constitution boldly designed horizontal ties across sensitive barriers of hierarchy, region, and belief. Race has tested them ever since, and only subterfuge or willful amnesia can deny its residual force. Race flipped the century-old “solid South” from Democratic to Republican after 1964. Dragnets now search predominantly black teenagers to confiscate guns in New York, while zealous coalitions elsewhere stockpile guns into predominantly white hands—all professing a race-neutral public safety. Partisan gridlock is racial by the numbers. The House of Representatives has packed itself into Democratic districts that average twice the non-white population compared with Republican districts that average fifty percent more white people. One national party tends to be skittish about race. The other transmutes latent fear and distrust into a pervasive hostility toward government.

King’s “dream” speech abides. Contrary to popular impression then, and lingering insistence today, he did not win favor by promising that African Americans would behave like white people. He said nearly the opposite, quite plainly. His ringing conclusion invited polyglot America—“all God’s children”—to join hands and sing a Negro spiritual, so that everyone for that moment could share inspirations forged during slavery. King invoked a larger patriotism in which people of every stripe reach from tip-toe stance across divisions between them. Free citizenship requires meeting each other half-way to build ties of comfort and strength. King’s burden was not the tip-toe stance itself but flatfooted disregard on the other side. His reward was small miracles of common purpose that made “movement” the watchword of national politics.

Now the watchword has atrophied to “spin,” cynical and stationary. The glory of freedom is still there, however, in far better shape than our fractured discourse suggests. President Obama should speak more from his tip-toe stance about race in our national journey. Spasms of objection can give way to more balanced history, but we all inherit the responsibility to make it so. King and his colleagues leave us a patriotic lesson that every citizen can become a modern Founder.

Taylor Branch wrote a prize-winning historical trilogy on the civil rights era, beginning with Parting the Waters (1988). His recent books are The Cartel (2011), about NCAA college sports, and The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement (2013). He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Christy Macy.

]]>http://taylorbranch.com/2013/08/16/remembering-the-march/feed/0The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement – now available in paperbackhttp://taylorbranch.com/2013/08/13/the-king-years-historic-moments-in-the-civil-rights-movement-now-available-in-paperback/
http://taylorbranch.com/2013/08/13/the-king-years-historic-moments-in-the-civil-rights-movement-now-available-in-paperback/#commentsTue, 13 Aug 2013 13:00:20 +0000http://taylorbranch.com/?p=2042 Below is the press release from Simon & Schuster announcing publication of The King Years in paperback. The soft cover edition is being published in stores today, August 13. E-Books and special Enhanced E-Books continue to be available online.

The paperback edition is written for general readers, but its compact size also meets suggestions from teachers at many levels. This is the first of my civil rights histories to be accompanied by a Teacher’s Guide, prepared by the award-winning educator Rosanne Lichatin.

I am grateful to Simon & Schuster, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and to the Preserve America Foundation for helping to crystallize vital lessons from history in civil rights and citizenship.

“Branch is as eloquent and trenchant as ever…the book recalls and revitalizes a history that deserves its details.” —Boston Globe

“A welcome addition to any civil rights bookshelf…In cutting his epic down to size, Branch intended ‘to convey both the spirit and the sweep of an extraordinary movement.’ With his highly readable anecdotal approach, he succeeds admirably…Branch’s storytelling skill makes this slim anthology so much more than the standard King-Parks story.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“…instead of getting a dry dates-and-events history book, readers are gifted with glimpses of life and ‘historically significant’ events, presented almost in the form of a novel….a well-known story from a new point of view…. very accessible for veterans of the movement, youngsters who weren’t born yet and for students of this subject. So if you’re looking this week for fresh reflection on a tumultuous period of time, find this.”—Augusta Chronicle

Taylor Branch is the author of the acclaimed America in the King Years trilogy, which includes the books Parting the Waters (which won the Pulitzer Prize for History), Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge. The three-volume narrative history endures as a masterpiece of storytelling on American race, violence, and democracy. With this new book now available in paperback, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement (Simon & Schuster; August 13, 2013; $16.00), Branch has identified eighteen essential moments from the Civil Rights Movement, and providing selections from his trilogy, has placed each moment in historical context with a newly written introduction. The captivating result is a slender but comprehensive view of America in the turbulent, transformative 1960s, by our nation’s foremost authoritative voice on the subject.

Branch looks back on his own work with fresh insight about what lessons and challenges remain most salient today. This compact book conveys the full sweep of an era, showing how a small bus boycott evolved into the signature freedom movement of the 20th century, generating worldwide inspiration and sustained progress toward equal citizenship in areas far beyond racial discrimination.

The King Years is meant for general readers, but Branch designed it also as a teaching tool for the digital age. Starting in January 2013, from his home town, he made this book the centerpiece for an experimental on-line seminar offered by the University of Baltimore. New, interactive technology promises an unmatched course on democratic leadership for a potentially worldwide audience. With this unique, handy addition to the literature on civil rights, readers can equip themselves for an uncertain future by absorbing hope from our resilient past.

The eighteen chapters include well-known, dramatic events such as the March on Washington, and major clashes over the Vietnam War, along with up-close views of iconic figures such as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedy brothers, and President Lyndon Johnson. Branch also features underappreciated characters such as Diane Nash and the mystical student leader Bob Moses, and he illuminates small but significant turning points in history. His chapter on voting rights, for instance, focuses neither on Selma’s famous Bloody Sunday assault nor the triumphant march into Montgomery. Instead, Branch takes readers inside the aborted “turnaround” march in between, when a divided nonviolent movement faced maximum pressure from every level of government. At a crossroads, Martin Luther King made uncertain choices amid fierce internal conflict. Were political threats or promises real? Was the hope of federal legislation more important than the cohesion of a battered citizens’ protest? How does one find the true path between prudence and bravado, hope and fear, cooperation and self-reliance?

Branch argues that these upheavals remain crucial for anyone who wishes to understand our divided political climate. In September 1963, network television doubled nightly coverage from only 15 to 30 minutes, sending into millions of homes extra images of ugly violence against a previously invisible black culture. Television showcased primal reactions for and against its projected new world. Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi appeared on an NBC News Special to accuse the media of a biased racial agenda, asserting that “the real goal of the conspiracy is the concentration of all effective power in the central government in Washington” (page 72).

A year later, final passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act coincided with two historic U-turns at the presidential nominating conventions. Chapter Ten reveals President Lyndon Johnson privately in anguish, on the verge of breakdown as he turned Democrats away from their century-old base in solid-South segregation, while the Republican candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater, turned the Party of Lincoln against its emancipator’s tradition by voting against the civil rights bill. “The 1964 election marked an unprecedented shift in the structure of national politics,” writes Branch. “A partisan reversal would take hold over decades, driven and yet muffled by race, tainting the word ‘liberal’ in both parties” (page 90).

Other chapters mention wrenching changes from the era that have become taken for granted and largely unnoticed. The Supreme Court struck down criminal laws that restricted marriage by race. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 opened naturalized U.S. citizenship to areas of the globe that had been excluded. Once desegregated, a new Sun Belt prosperity rose in southern states that had been stigmatized and poor. Women entered Ivy League colleges, military academies, new professions, and much of the clergy. To cover urban areas sealed off in a riot, the Los Angeles Times hired its first Negro reporter in 1965. Prisons turned darker and far more crowded. Nonviolence, the most powerful doctrine of the early civil rights movement, receded from public discourse. Cultural experts detected a broad de-glamorization of the word “city.” Negroes became black people, then African-Americans, prominent in the arts and exceptional in high places.

Throughout the book, Branch communicates this watershed history in personal stories. Profound debates move from church kitchens to the White House. Ordinary citizens risk their lives for equal treatment, and people contend over many styles of leadership. Through dramatic narrative, readers experience suffering that tested the basic premise of self-government. They also feel the perseverance and discovery that enlarged historic movements to refine democratic freedom.

The King Years is being published in paperback, ebook, and enhanced ebook editions. The enhanced ebook showcases additional videos and music throughout the text, making it a rich multi-media learning experience. Such resources include film of Walter Cronkite interviewing President Kennedy, King discussing his early plans for sustained demonstrations in Birmingham, b-roll of sit-in demonstrations, and tracks of Freedom songs. Simon & Schuster has also created a teacher’s guide of The King Years for classroom, library, and reading group use.

A special note from the author to educators and all of us still learning:

“For nearly twenty-five years,” says Taylor Branch, “since publication of Parting the Waters, teachers have pressed upon me their need for more accessible ways to immerse students in stories of authentic detail and import. Against my published habits, which are hardly succinct, the goal here is to accommodate them and others by careful choice.”

“This single-volume project has been a daunting but exhilarating challenge,” Branch adds. “American history teachers are embattled, partly because the United States has decided to evaluate schools by test scores limited to reading and math. By downgrading the history of our distinctive national experiment, we would leave future generations less prepared to understand and exercise their vital responsibility as free citizens.”

Branch continues, “For all readers, I believe, lessons from the civil rights era apply not to bygone forms of racial segregation but most urgently to a troubled future. Drawn from the core of our national purpose, they show how ordinary people can work miracles against intractable burdens to advance both freedom and the common good.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Taylor Branch is the bestselling author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63; Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65; At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968; and The Clinton Tapes. He has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Baltimore.

Simon & Schuster has created a teacher’s guide for classroom, library, and reading group use. Please request a copy.